Today
every Tom, Dick and Harry has a last name, but that wasn’t always so. I doubt that our ancestors were named Fred
and Barney, but until they started to sort themselves out and create a
hierarchy, I’d surmise that everyone needed only one name. For millennia, rural people were so far out
of town that they knew everyone in the area.
It was when they congregated in cities that they had to tack identifiers
on to their simple names.
Once
folks realized there were others around with their name they began to tack on
the name of town they were from. Thus we
have George Washington, whose forebears were from Washington in England, or
James Galway, from Ireland. In English we don’t use the ‘from’, but among
others, the German Von, the French or Spanish De, or the Italian Da, mean
‘from’. Think of Von Richtofen or DaVinci.
Meanwhile, back at
home, the population was growing. Tom
wasn’t the only Tom in town, so in many places he became Tom Johnson, the son
of John. In Arab countries a son was
ibn-, in Hebrew he was ben-, they’re almost the same. In Gaelic, Mac or Mc
means son, and O’ means grandson. Could a Scots-Irish lad be O’MacDonald? In the Scandinavian countries a son was -son
sometimes -sen. Erik the Red was Erik Thorvaldsson. A daughter was -dóttir
or -datter. This is still used in Iceland, where Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the
world’s first democratically elected female head of state.
In other instances, instead of being a
son of someone, folks added their profession to their given name. They became
Tom Baker, Margaret Thatcher, Maurice Chevalier, or Robert Allen Zimmermann.
One ‘n’ or two, a zimmermann is a carpenter, but we know this one as a singer:
Bob Dylan. They might have had a characteristic that distinguished them: if
they were redheads they might be Russo in Italy or Rousseau in France. If they
lived by a lake or pond they became Veronica Lake or James Pond. If their
father worked for a bishop, abbot, or priest, or if their father was one, they
might use that as their surname. Is that
how that comic became Joey Bishop? Nah,
his last name was Gottlieb, which is German for God’s love, and that might have
begun as a nick name.
In
1979, the United Nations adopted a measure that states, among other things,
that there should be equal rights in the transmission of family names. Parents
can decide to give their children either the name of the father or mother, or a
hyphenation of both – although no more than two names can be hyphenated. I
wonder what happens when a Smith-Wong marries a Patel-Jones. Though in one form
and one place or another this has been going on for a long time, many couples
are now deciding on the wife keeping her own name and their children having a
combined surname. When James Pope marries
Anne Sicola, their children’s surname will be Pope-Sicola.
So, surnames came from relationships,
towns, locations, occupations, even nicknames. There are many whose origins
remain a mystery. It’s said that the name Ryan can’t be traced, but that’s the
luck o’ the Irish for you. Surname is from the Old French ‘sur’, meaning
‘super’ or ‘on’ or ‘on top of,’ and ‘nom’, meaning name. We’ve just skimmed the
surface of surnames. Names from our
western European heritage, once so prevalent in the States, have been joined by
a United Nations of names, and their origins are interesting and very
intriguing.
This post is from May 2011. I was
thinking about it again because I was marveling at the mixture of names and
heritages for my three youngest granddaughters.
Their last name is Scottish, but decorating their family tree they will
also find the flags of Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and Poland.(With the Stars and Stripes on the top
of the tree.) I think this mix of backgrounds is wonderful – I hope that
they’ll appreciate it and want to learn more about it as they get older.
